leftsector 🟦⬜️🌲

Pussy Riot occupies headquarters of American tech company Ubiquiti which powers Russian war crimes Since the disabling of Starlink, Russian soldiers been panicking: “All we’ve got left now are radios, cables and pigeons.” But Ubiquiti’s hardware has emerged as the favorite replacement.  We demand that Ubiquiti: - Obey U.S. sanctions - Acknowledge Russian military use - Work with Ukraine to stop it

@curiouswavefn What details did it get wrong?

My mentor Freeman Dyson once wrote a great piece titled "In Praise of Amateurs" in which he described how amateur scientists largely operating outside institutional constraints made important discoveries. His favorite example was Bernhard Schmidt, a one-Estonian optician (he had lost two fingers of his hand in a lab accident) who invented the Schmidt telescope, forerunner of modern telescopes. In another piece titled "Our Biotech Future", he talked about a DIY biology future in which "domesticated biotechnology, once it gets into the hands of housewives and children, will give us an explosion of diversity of new living creatures...children will have contests to see whose seeds lead to the prickliest cactus or whose egg hatches the cutest dinosaur". I suspect Freeman would have been very pleased to see how AI is democratizing science and enabling discoveries by ordinary citizens. It's why he would have celebrated the story of the Australian engineer who used AI to discover a cure for his dog's cancer, even if it might have been hyped and got details wrong. The whole point of science is to be of service to society, and the more ordinary citizens can use it the merrier. Of course we need to be mindful of the dangers and of guardrails, but the history of science shows that science has never expanded beyond its horizons by being conservative.

People erroneously believe Istanbul is the only true Eurasian city, while the most Eurasian thing ever, the kebab croissant, was, in fact, ideated in Lviv, Ukraine

How Samurai Jack uses the 60:30:10 color rule to create visual magic

A Gulf resident plays the buzzing sound of a Shahed-type drone from a boombox outside a neighbor's home at night, prompting panicked reactions from residents inside, March 2026.

Huh

@KarenFOrlando @LoserInstitute @mattyglesias Who won the 2020 election?

@LoserInstitute @mattyglesias What do these mean on NY drivers licenses: f, m and X? Provide answer like this: F on drivers license means holder is female or male...Thanks. If you have trouble put in ChatGPT.

If you have the basic skills to participate in the discourse at all — like you can read and comprehend a New York Times article in order to complain about it — you’re in a weird, out of touch, elite bubble. slowboring.com/p/in-defense-o…

The $46 billion vape industry hired flavor chemists to solve a specific problem: nicotine tastes bitter. The human tongue has T2R receptors that detect nicotine and trigger aversion. So the industry reverse-engineered the problem. They loaded e-liquids with fruity aromatic compounds like farnesol, farnesene, and ethyl butyrate that suppress the bitterness signal and activate sweetness perception through the orbitofrontal cortex instead. Turns out they built something more powerful than a nicotine delivery system. A 2023 study in the Journal of Neuroscience found that green apple vape flavorants, with zero nicotine present, independently fire dopamine neurons in the ventral tegmental area and increase dopamine release in the nucleus accumbens. The same reward circuitry that nicotine hijacks. The flavor chemicals alone were producing reward-seeking behavior in mice. A separate study found strawberry additives significantly increased nicotine vapor sampling, meaning the fruit smell made subjects inhale more of the drug without any conscious decision to do so. 95% of vape users choose flavored products. The industry has always framed this as “consumer preference.” The neuroscience says the flavors are pharmacologically active compounds that directly alter brain reward circuits and increase drug intake. Now look at what those compounds do once the device gets tossed. The UK was discarding 5 million disposable vapes per week before the ban. The aromatic volatiles don’t stop broadcasting once the device is empty. Orthonasal olfaction, the same pathway that makes you smell a strawberry from across a room, works identically in mammals. A squirrel’s olfactory system processes fruity volatiles through the same receptor families humans use. The signal reads as food. Nobody saw squirrels gnawing on Marlboro butts for 60 years. Vapes show up and suddenly there’s footage from London, Philadelphia, and Wales. The animals are chewing on lithium batteries wrapped in candy-scented plastic because the flavor engineering worked exactly as designed on a nervous system it was never tested on. The lithium in those discarded vapes equals 5,000 electric vehicle batteries per year. Oxford researchers found the cells inside can cycle 450+ times, but the product is built to be used once and thrown in a park. A squirrel holding a blueberry vape on a Brixton fence is the most honest product review the flavor chemists have ever received.

Unfortunate that it actually is the Sneako’s and Nick Fuentes’s of the world who represent a kind of traditional western man: ranting about degeneracy and the “woman problem.”

That balloon isn’t touching the ground anytime soon.

@mattyglesias Did anyone “get it right” using a good method, or naw

When Trump won in 2016, most sensible people were surprised because he was down in the polls and "the candidate who is up in the polls will probably win" is a sound forecasting principle. But people who "got it right" (i.e., used bad methods) gained prestige as a result.

@KnoxieLuv Yeah but uh… this time they REALLY mean it!

They already agreed to that BEFORE you bombed them!

If people are fighting for an orb you are reading fantasy. If people are fighting for a cube you are reading sci-fi. If it has more sides than that. I dont know. I dont know man.

Just discovered 1920s German Brick Expressionism and my life will never be the same

Jewish Germans had the highest rates of volunteering for the German Army in WWI. 100,000 jewish Germans served in WWI, out of a population of merely 500,000, meaning 40% of all male jewish Germans served. Also one has to understand one context about that picture: It was taken not in Germany but in Poland, which German had just taken from the Russian Empire. Russia was an extremely antisemeitic society while German at that time was one of the most philosemitic in Europe. So theese Jews are not laughing at the German soldier, they are happy about Germany defeating Russia.

he was in it for the domestic racism, not a war.

In the immortal words of James Carville

Go ahead, tell me it was a Jewish pickleball court. Say that you’re just asking questions. Don’t make any assertions at all, just vaguely insinuate that it’s a conspiracy. Tell me I’m goycattle for thinking a 75yo guy dying after smashing his head on concrete is plausible.

🚨 Do you understand what just happened.. five minutes before Trump announced he's halting attacks on Iran.. someone bought $1.5 billion in S&P 500 futures and sold $192 million in oil.. five minutes.. not five days.. not five hours.. five minutes.. the trades were 4 to 6 times larger than anything else hitting the market at that time.. someone knew the exact words the President was going to say before he said them.. and turned that information into the biggest single trade of the day.. they tell you the stock market is a "free and fair market".. that "anyone can build wealth".. that "the system works for everyone".. the system worked for someone today.. five minutes before you even knew what happened.. they already got paid.. this isn't insider trading anymore.. insider trading implies they're hiding it.. this is broad daylight.